Following our recent monitoring inspection we are pleased to publish our latest monitoring report. In a letter to parents, Duncan Fraser Chair of Governors explains,

This visit took place during the week before the Christmas holiday and the final report from the visit will be publicly available on the Ofsted website this Thursday. During the visit three inspectors visited lessons to observe learning in progress as well as meeting with senior leaders, middle leaders, classroom teachers, teaching assistants, parents and governors. You will see from the letter that he has found the school is making reasonable progress towards the removal of special measures. While this may not sound great, the way Ofsted works is that this visit had only two possible outcomes; making reasonable progress or not making reasonable progress and in actual fact the verbal feedback given was much more enthusiastic.

During the verbal feedback Steve Isherwood made it very clear that he had seen a completely different school to the one represented in our Ofsted report. He acknowledged that the school has wasted no time at all and has managed to maintain the momentum he observed before the summer. In his words ‘this is obviously a school that is on a rapid journey of improvement.’ He praised the various new initiatives that have been introduced since September; the new behaviour policy, new whole school marking policy, progress tracking and the changes to the structure of the school day. He was very complementary of the enthusiasm that pupils showed for their school and the way it is improving.

There are of course still areas in which we need to make further improvement but this is now becoming more a case of getting consistency across every class as opposed to fixing problems. There has been a lot of external support and training in school since we went into special measures but that external support has become less and less required to the extent that members of staff are now supporting each other’s development in school. Importantly, where the visit highlighted weaknesses we had without exception already identified them ourselves and had already begun addressing them.

It was very satisfying to have all the improvements that have been made recognised and acknowledged and we now have an even clearer focussed vision of what we need to do to in terms of continued school improvement; through this journey out of special measures and then continuing on to good and outstanding.